The Nature Of Time

That eminent scientist, Sir Oliver Lodge, offers an ingenious and
interesting, though very technical explanation of this class of
clairvoyant phenomena as follows: "Time is but a relative mode of
regarding things; we progress through phenomena at a certain definite
pace, and this subjective advance we interpret in an objective manner,
as if events moved necessarily in this order and at this precise rate.
But that may be only one mode of regarding them. The events may be in
some sort of existence always, both past and future, and it may be we
who are arriving at them, not they which are happening. The analogy of a
traveler in a railway train is useful; if he could never leave the
train, nor alter its pace, he would probably consider the landscapes as
necessarily successive, and be unable to conceive their co-existence. We
perceive, therefore, a possible fourth dimensional aspect about time,
the inexorableness of whose flow may be a natural part of our present
limitations. And if we once grasp the idea that past and future may be
actually existing, we can recognize that they may have a controlling
influence on all present action, and the two together may constitute the
'higher plane' or totality of things after which, it seems to me, we are
impelled to seek, in connection with the directing of form or
determinism, and the action of human beings consciously directed to a
definite and preconceived end."